“blasting this tape thru L.A. windows down on my 2002 camry…”

When I read this endorsement on the Bandcamp page for Persona La Ave’s new release Relation / Temptation, my first and only thought was: “Yes.” One of my strongest visual (and auditory) memories from my young adulthood in Los Angeles is the image of my friend pulling up to meet me on a quiet suburban street in his secondhand white Volvo, sunglasses donned, shit-eating grin on his face, a golden-azure sky casting its unequivocal blessings above both of us, and the bumping bass and energetic synth lines of music just like this vibrating out of his open windows. This moment not only stuck in my head because it was a beautiful one, but also because it was such a succinct and eloquent summary of what kind of joy we had striven to construct for ourselves in this particular environment. A sort of constant euphoria, free of the drama of narrative—just jams and smiles, a serotonin-soaked stasis confirmed by the city’s everlasting sunshine.

To me, “future funk”—the label that has so aptly defined the music of up and coming artists on labels like Keats//Collective and Persona La Ave’s own MJMJ Records—is intrinsically connected to this construction we made for those last few years before real grown-up-ness. And it is no coincidence either, I believe, that this has become a unique and compelling sound for so many kids whose ages hover either around or within the perimeters of the college years. For our generation, it can often feel like dread surrounds us. There is the uncertainty of a changing economy, questions of success and employment in a time when we are expected to expect the worst and are branded as spoiled and entitled if we try to expect the best, a new story of social injustice every day made all the more available through the presence of social media. Just listing it all makes me exhausted—so I’ll stop. And instead I’ll talk about the kind of relief that a song like “Jammin on the One” or “Going Deaf” provides us as a foil against all this gross and uncomfortable reality.

These maximal washes of pleasure, these major-major tonalities, these slap-happy bass lines, all of the aspects of late-era funk that once affirmed abundance in an age when affluence appeared to be ubiquitous and increasing with every second, now give us anxious listeners of the next generation—a generation living in an era that often feels like one of scarcity rather than plentitude—not a sense of confirming our present state in time, but rather, a sense that we are allowed, for a few minutes, to escape that unfortunate present, and instead, create a happiness that we need to feel okay. It conveys what I can only describe as an ecstatic rejection of the pragmatism that can so quickly and easily become cynicism when looked at honestly.

But Relation / Temptation is a unique tape, in that later on, in songs like “Make Your Luck,” where a feverish chopped up sample expresses fears of insanity, it also embraces that honesty, that anxiety that eventually will pervade and bog down our fantasies once they lose their potency. Because often when driving around in my own hand-me-down car, lost in careless optimism, I would remember that all this joy depended upon a dependence upon fossil fuels, that perhaps one day, I would not be able to enjoy this experience at all, and that, the more that I blasted these songs through my vehicle, the more I was using up a resource that was, despite our denial, just not renewable. And to me, this makes Persona La Ave’s release perhaps the most accurate “future funk” record that has been made thus far. That sense of ecstatic rejection—that is a feeling that I have absorbed from many records before this one. But this is the first record of this kind where I also hear in its closing moments that very object that we are trying so desperately hard to reject—the first “future funk” record where “future,” in all its exciting and terrifying meanings, is looked at from its best and worst sides.

Relation / Temptation is available now via MJMJ Records.